Heraclitus 124: σάρμα εἰκῇ κεχυμένον ὁ κάλλιστος, φησὶν Ἡράκλειτος, [ὁ] κόσμος
Balis’ translation: “The comeliest order on earth is but a heap of random sweepings.” (p.18)
What is odd about Balis’ translation of the Greek (and of all others I have found) is that there is no evidence for the word ‘but’ in the original Greek. Here is a literal translation in the order of the actual Greek:
Sweepings at random piled up the most beautiful, says Heraclitus, (the) kosmos.
'Kosmos' in Greek has a variety of meanings: order, arrangement, universe. A more graceful rendering of the original Greek:
The most beautiful kosmos, says Heraclitus, is sweepings piled up at random.
By leaving out the ‘but’ a jarringly different meaning emerges. Things swept up at random somehow present an ‘arrangement’ that is most beautiful to behold. Frazier in Cold Mountain does begin with the pejorative meaning that the ‘but’ implies, but ends with something surprisingly more positive and more faithful to the original Greek. Here is Inman’s last vision:
When she reached the place, the boy had already gathered up the horses and gone. She went to the men on the ground and looked at them, and she found Inman apart from them. She sat and held him in her lap. He tried to talk, but she hushed him. He drifted in and out and dreamed a bright dream of a home. It had coldwater spring rising out of rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plans blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October, corn tops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields, laurels blooming on the hillsides, ditch banks full of orange jewelweed, white blossoms on dogwood, purple on redbud. Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and a great number of crows, or at least the spirits of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs. There was something he wanted to say. (p. 353)
We do not know what Inman wanted to say. We are left with "everything coming around at once' and with "a home", a kosmos, a beautiful arrangement of things all out of order. Disorder order, order disorder. The way things are and are not.
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